psocoptera

The Warrior Within, Angus McIntyre, novella. An enjoyable and satisfying puzzle-box of a story with a neat setting and some excellent action business. Dude with multiple sub-dudes in his head has to deal with strangers who come to town. I'm pretty fond of the whole "coming up with sffnal reasons for multiple personalities" thing; I feel like you can tell "taking turns in the body" stories with a setup of Magic/Science that would be icky to tell in a contemporary setting with a setup of childhood trauma. Anyways, this was just the sort of thing that makes me love the novella as a length format, a just-right amount of story, well-paced. I would happily read the next thing from this author, especially the next thing set in this universe.

Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach, Kelly Robson, novella. THIS HAS A CYBORG OCTOPUS LADY ON THE COVER so obviously I was very excited (and, like, not a sexy cyborg octopus lady, she looks kind of old and here to work and maybe pissed off. Older lady protagonists, I love.) (Illustration by Jon Foster for pro artist purposes.) Kelly Robson is "Waters of Versailles" and "Three Resurrections of Jessica Churchill"; she was a Campbell finalist in 2017. This is a whopper of a first book - they're calling it a novella because it's part of Tor.com's novella line, but I suspect it of secretly being a short novel - jam-packed with an interesting future, a lush past I wish we saw even more of, generational conflict, character conflict... this is unusual for me, but I think it could well have supported being longer, to have time to give a little more space and development to some of the threads. Anyways, this is serious time travel fiction in the genre of Doomsday Book or Pastwatch with some really excellent world building and character work. Recommended, and going on my exciting novella shortlist with Binti: Night Masquerade and Black God's Drums, unless someone can determine that it's going to count as a novel for Hugo purposes. (I don't understand why we can't just have word counts as a routine part of publication information, bah. ETA: RSR thinks it clocks in at 39,653 words, so I guess it just squeaks under! RSR are transphobic dickwads and I wouldn't quote their opinions about anything but I think their word counting is probably competent.)